Feldötö, Zsombor

Varga, Imre

Blomberg, Eva

Abstract [en]

A quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and dual polarization interferometry (DPI) have been utilized to study how the
structure of poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH)/poly(styrene sulfonate) (PSS) multilayers is affected by the rinsing
method (i.e., the termination of polyelectrolyte adsorption). The effect of the type of counterions used in the deposition
solution was also investigated, and the polyelectrolyte multilayers were formed in a 0.5 M electrolyte solution (NaCl and KBr). From the measurements, it was observed that thicker layers were obtained when using KBr in the deposition solution
than when using NaCl. Three different rinsing protocols have been studied: (i) the same electrolyte solution as used during
multilayer formation, (ii) purewater, and (iii) first a salt solution (0.5M) and then purewater.When the multilayerwith PAH
as the outermost layer was exposed to pure water, an interesting phenomenon was discovered: a large change in the energy dissipationwas measured with theQCM.This could be attributed to the swelling of the layer, and from bothQCMandDPI it is obvious that only the outermost PAH layer swells (to a thickness of 25-30 nm) because of a decrease in ionic strength and hence an increase in intra- and interchain repulsion, whereas the underlying layers retain a very rigid and compact structure with a low water content. Interestingly, the outermost PAH layer seems to obtain very similar thicknesses in water independent of the electrolyte used for the multilayer buildup. Another interesting aspect was that the measured thickness with the DPI evaluated by a single-layer model did not correlate with the estimated thickness from the model calculations performed on theQCM-Ddata. Thus,we applied a two-layermodel to evaluate theDPI data and the resultswere in excellent agreement with the QCM-D results. To our knowledge, this evaluation of DPI data has not been done previously.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages

2010. Vol. 26, no 22, 17048-17057 p.

Keyword [en]

Influence of salt and rinsing protocol on the structure of PAH/PSS polyelectrolyte multilayers